Lesley.] 



44 



[April . 



presence of the plants, that he actually erected a powerful 

 rock-crusher, and sunk a shaft, by blasting 38 feet, intending 

 to drift in the directions in which he found the saturation to 

 prevail, and to distil the rock after it had been reduced to 

 powder. Of course such a project was most unprofitable ; 

 but it well illustrates the abundance of the petroleum held by 

 the friable sandrock. Some of the great blocks of rock 

 which have fallen from the cliifs too recently to be as yet de- 

 composed, are literally full of the marks of the broken mace- 

 rated driftwood of that period. For hundreds of square 

 miles this vast stratum of ancient sea-sand is a thick packed 

 herbarium of coal-measure plants. My brother, in his report 

 of the counties further west, writes :* " Thin streaks of coal 

 are jammed in between the layers of the base of the Con- 

 glomerate, and even inlaid in the heart of the solid rock, all 

 along the line." But if the loose sands of the banks of Paint 

 Creek, derived, as they are, from this sandrock, can at the 

 present day receive and retain vast quantities of petroleum, 

 in spite of the perpetual washings to which they are subjected, 

 we can easily conceive of the wide, flat sandy shores of the 

 coal islands of the ancient Archipelago of the coal era be- 

 coming completely charged with the decomposed and decom- 

 posable reliquise of both the plants of the land and the 

 animals of the sea. 



The Conglomerate is very irregular in its internal com- 

 position, or "false-bedded," even to angles of 15°, or 

 more. Instances are given below, taken from near Davis's 

 House. Under the rock in Fig. 7 Davis's principal oil 



Fig. 7. 



* K. K., Vol. IV, 1858, p. 454. 



